A container terminal can be roughly divided into three areas, i.e., a quay, a yard and a hinterland. The quay is a place where a ship temporarily anchors. At the quay, containers are loaded into or unloaded from the ship. The yard is a temporary storage place for containers before they are exported or imported. The hinterland is a place where external trucks carrying containers come in and out.
In particular, since many containers enter and leave the yard every day, an efficient operation of the yard has a significant impact on the overall productivity of the container terminal. Accordingly, it is required to operate the yard with an optimized strategy in the field.
A yard crane work plan of the container terminal determines which container to stack where. For example, the yard crane work plan of the container terminal can determine a crane work assignment problem and a container device positioning problem.
The crane work assignment problem is a matter of determining the container which the crane of the yard will work with. Since the container terminal has different types of containers depending on the purposes, if the crane transports containers at random, the transportation of the other crane may be interrupted.
Further, the container device positioning problem is a matter of determining the stacking position of the containers entering the yard. When containers are stacked in the yard, since there is a limitation due to the size, weight or the like, if the containers are stacked at random, an available space of the yard may become insufficient.
Therefore, optimization of the yard crane work plan is required. To this end, a strategy-based planning method can be used. However, a conventional strategy-based planning method has a problem that it specializes only in work scenarios used in search for strategies. In other words, the conventional strategy-based planning method exhibits good performance only in specialized work scenarios and poor performance in other work scenarios, which is problematic.